Fatness, girlhood, and self-acceptance in Gippi and Fanney Khan. Issue 1 (2nd January 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Singh, Shailendra Kumar
• Is Part Of: Fat studies. Volume 11:Issue 1(2022)
• Page Start: 83
• Page End: 97
• Publication Date: 2022-01-02
• Subjects: Hindi cinema -- fatness -- Gippi -- self-acceptance -- girlhood studies -- Fanney Khan -- Lata Mangeshkar; Obesity -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Obesity -- Psychological aspects -- Periodicals; Overweight persons -- Periodicals; Body weight -- Psychological aspects -- Periodicals; 362.196398
• DOI: 10.1080/21604851.2021.1879511
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2160-4851

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article explores the multiple discursive negotiations through which adolescent fat subjectivities are reconstituted in two films, namely Gippi (2013) and Fanney Khan (2018). Taking an intersectional approach between the fat acceptance movement and girlhood studies, it demonstrates how the female protagonists challenge, question, and eventually undermine the hitherto existing paradigms of corporeality in Hindi cinema. The fat female body that is often relegated to the margins of the diegetic spaces of visual representations and popular cultures in South Asia, is accorded narrative centrality to provide a differential grammar of beauty, success, and empowerment. Though fatness is delineated in these two films as either a subject of intense hostility and antagonism between competing girls or a matter of desexualized femininity and traditional sartorial choices, it still facilitates an oppositional and counter-hegemonic ideal that destabilizes dominant notions of sizeism and fatphobia.